What Angels Fear (36 page)

Lovejoy came around his desk, one hand outstretched to usher his visitor toward a chair. “Mrs. Talbot, I understand your desire to help the Viscount, but believe me when I say that this is entirely unnecessary—”

“Unnecessary?” She jerked away from him, her blue eyes flashing with unexpected fire. “What do you think? That I’m making this up? John swore he’d kill me if he ever found out I’d seen Sebastian again. Do you think I would risk that? For a lie?”

Lovejoy stopped, his hand falling to his side, all the old doubts about this case blooming anew within him. “What are you saying? That you met Lord Devlin last Tuesday evening despite your husband’s prohibition?”

She went to stand before the window overlooking the square. “John told me about the duel—bragged about it, about how he was going to kill Sebastian.”

“So you . . . what? Thought to warn his lordship that your husband intended to shoot to kill? Surely his lordship was aware of that?”

She shook her head, her lips curling up unexpectedly into a wry smile. “John could never have bested Sebastian. I went to Sebastian to secure his promise that he would not kill my husband.”

She swung away from the window. “That surprises you, does it?” she said when Lovejoy only stared at her. “You think that if I were truly miserable with my husband I would have been glad to be rid of him in whatever way possible. You don’t understand what it’s like for a woman. As difficult as my life is, John is all I have. My father would never take me back. If anything happens to my husband, I’ll be left destitute. On the streets. I couldn’t face that.”

“Where did you meet with Lord Devlin?”

“In a quiet corner of the park. I don’t think anyone saw us. I swear, all we did was talk. But even if John could be brought to believe that, it wouldn’t matter. He’d—” Her voice cracked and she broke off.

Lovejoy watched her slim throat work as she swallowed. There were bruises there, he realized, nearly hidden by the lace edging of her dress. Four bruises in the shape of a man’s fingerprints. “What time was this?”

“From half past five until just before eight.”

It must have taken a considerable effort, Lovejoy thought, for Captain John Talbot’s beautiful young wife to convince Lord Devlin not to kill her abusive husband. But if she were telling the truth, it would have been virtually impossible for Devlin to have made it to the Lady Chapel of St. Matthew of the Fields in Westminster in time to kill Rachel York either before or after his meeting with Mrs. Talbot.

If she were telling the truth.

Lovejoy fixed her with a hard stare. “What made you decide to come forward with this now?”

A hint of color touched her pale cheeks. “I should have told you the truth before. But Sebastian had sent me a note, through my sister.” Opening her reticule, she drew forth a torn, creased piece of paper and handed it to Lovejoy. “He warned me to keep silent. I kept hoping you’d realize that it was all a mistake, your thinking Sebastian was somehow involved in that woman’s death, that I wouldn’t need to say anything. That John need never know. . . .”

Lovejoy stared down at the hastily written words on the scrap of paper. The ink was smudged, as if with tears. “There is no need for you to say anything.”

“What?” She shook her head, her eyes wide, not comprehending. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that there is no point for you to put yourself at risk by coming forward with this information. Thanks to the duel, your association with Lord Devlin is well known and the worst possible implications have been read into it. It will simply be assumed that you’ve made this story up, that you are lying to protect the man you love.”

“But it’s the truth.” Her narrowed eyes searched his face. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“As a man, here and now, I would probably say yes. But as a judge, weighing your testimony against the other evidence in court?” He shrugged. “I think not.”

“But that’s absurd.”

Lovejoy tucked the Viscount’s note into his pocket. “That’s the law.”

Chapter 51

L
ord Frederick’s butler seized the brass handle of the library door, his eyes going wide. “It’s locked.”

Sebastian thrust the man aside and kicked out hard. The wood splintered beneath his boot heel and the door slammed open against the wall with a shattering crash.

The room beyond lay in semidarkness. The fire in the grate had been allowed to burn low, and someone had drawn the heavy brocade drapes across the windows. The only light came from a flickering brass oil lamp on the desk, the frosted glass shade casting a soft glow over what was left of Lord Frederick Fairchild.

He lay sprawled back at an unnatural angle in his desk chair, one hand dangling limply toward the carpet. Blood was everywhere—on the polished wooden desktop, on the tufted leather chair, the bookcases and paneled walls beyond. Sebastian thought, at first, that the man who had killed Rachel York and Mary Grant must somehow have made it here to this house before him. Then his gaze fell on the neat little ivory-handled pistol still gripped in Lord Frederick’s clenched hand, and he understood.

Swiping a trickle of mingling rainwater and sweat from his face, Sebastian crossed the room’s Oriental carpet to jerk open the drapes at the windows overlooking the rear garden. The pale light of a rainy winter’s afternoon suffused the room. Fairchild had held the pistol’s muzzle against his temple, shattering the right side of his head into a bloody, pulpy mess. Sebastian was just turning from the window when the man’s chest jerked, his mouth opening as he sucked in air and breathed. He’d blown away the better part of the side of his skull, so that Sebastian could see the shiver of the man’s brain beneath the white bone of his skull and the torn, bloody flesh of his scalp. But he wasn’t dead yet.

“
Merciful heavens
,” said the butler with a startled gasp, one fist pressing against his lips as he fled the room. From the hall came the sound of someone violently retching.

Lord Frederick took another labored breath. “Should have put the damned muzzle in my mouth,” he whispered.

Sebastian hunkered down beside him. “Do you know who I am?”

A flicker of recognition showed in the man’s eyes. “He had one of my letters. One of my letters to Wesley.”

“Who? Who has the letters?”

“Jarvis.” The man’s shattered head moved restlessly against the bloody leather of his chair. “Showed it to the Prince. Said it had been found amongst Leo Pierrepont’s papers . . . that I was working with Pierrepont to go behind the Prince’s back and make peace with France.” His next breath rattled in his throat. “Not true. Never betrayed my country. Never would . . .”

“But the Prince believed it?”

The man’s eyes squeezed shut as if in a spasm of pain, his voice fading. “Jarvis . . . Jarvis said if I didn’t go quietly, he’d see the letter was made public. Couldn’t let Elizabeth . . . My little girl . . . Ruin her.”

Sebastian leaned forward, one hand wrapping around the chair’s leather-padded arm. “The letter—
how did Jarvis get it
?”

Fairchild’s eyes stared back at him, wide and sightless.

Sebastian sat back on his heels, his hand still gripping the chair’s arm. He became aware, suddenly, of the insistent shrill of a constable’s whistle and the butler’s voice shouting, “There. He’s in there. In the library.”

Sebastian was on his feet, tossing up one of the rear windows, when he heard the sound of running footsteps crossing the marbled hall. He threw one leg over the windowsill.

“You there! Stop! Stop, I say!”

Slipping through the window, Sebastian landed lightly in a bed of wet, freeze-browned foliage and darkly sodden earth, and broke into a run.

Charles, Lord Jarvis, startled his valet by returning to Berkeley Square shortly before four that afternoon. He wasn’t a physically vain man, Jarvis, but the events at Carlton House that evening would be particularly momentous. And in an age that placed inordinate importance upon appearance, a wise man attended to such things.

Donning knee breeches and silk stockings with a swallow-tailed coat, he resisted his valet’s efforts to lighten his florid complexion with a hint of powder, and made his way downstairs to his library. Jarvis might keep chambers in St. James’s Palace and Carlton House, but his most important papers were here, in Berkeley Square.

He had to admit that he’d been mildly worried at one point, that the sensational manner of that girl’s death might create difficulties. But in the end all had gone off essentially as planned. The looming danger of a Whig government had been averted; Perceval and the Tories would remain in power and the war against atheism, republicanism, and the forces of evil would continue.

Pausing at the base of the stairs, Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to his nostrils and breathed in deeply, sighing with satisfaction. There were those, he knew, who couldn’t understand why he resisted the Prince’s strenuous efforts to convince Jarvis himself to form a government. But Jarvis understood what most did not: that men who align themselves openly with one party or policy thereby lose any semblance of objectivity, and that those who seek to exercise their power through office all too often find themselves
out
of office and therefore out of power. Jarvis’s allegiance was to Britain and her king, not to any party or ideology, and he had no need for the petty flattery and pomp of a premiership. His dominance rested not on some fleeting government position, but on the supremacy of his intellect and the strength of his personality and the selfless wisdom of his unswerving devotion to his country and its monarchy.

Tucking the snuffbox back into his coat pocket, Jarvis opened his library door, surprised to find the heavy drapes at the window still open to the cold, darkening afternoon. A whisper of movement jerked his gaze to his desk, where a young man stood, a roughly-dressed young man with a mud-smeared, rain soaked coat and a neat little Cassaignard pistol.

“Unexpected, but fortuitous,” said Viscount Devlin, his strange amber eyes gleaming as he leveled the pistol at Jarvis’s chest. “Please, do come in.”

Chapter 52

T
he yellow fog was coming back.

He couldn’t see it yet, but Sir Henry Lovejoy could smell it in the cold, moist air as he paid off the hackney and hurried through the churchyard. A raw bitterness pinched at his nostrils and burned his throat and tore at his lungs. Soon, it would be upon them again, like a thick, stinking blanket of death.

Pausing, he stared up at the squat western towers and plain facade of St. Matthew of the Fields, the golden sandstone blackened by centuries of coal smoke and grime. The yellow fog had been upon them last Tuesday night, he remembered.

He kept thinking about what the Earl of Hendon had told him, how his lordship had come here at ten o’clock that night to meet Rachel York and found the north transept door unlocked, as she had said it would be. At the time Lovejoy had dismissed his lordship’s statements, had thought them the inventions of a father desperate to save his only son and heir from the hangman’s noose. Now Lovejoy wasn’t so certain.

He followed the sound of a spade striking dirt around to the back of the church, where he found the sexton, Jem Cummings, digging a grave.

“Mr. Cummings,” said Lovejoy, being careful not to venture too close to the new grave’s muddy edge. “I was wanting to ask you if there was any way Rachel York could have entered St. Matthew’s church after eight o’clock last Tuesday night?”

The sexton’s rhythm broke, earth sliding back into the grave from his shovel as he faltered. He hesitated, then sank the metal tip deep into the earth with a loud
thwunk
. “I been lockin’ that north transept door every night since ’ninety-two,” he said, throwing a shovelful of dirt high and wide, “ever since one o’ them heathen Jacobins come in here and—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said Lovejoy hastily, cutting him off. “But that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if there’s any way Rachel York—or perhaps someone else—could have unlocked that door after you left. You must understand that your answer could be of vital importance to this case. The life of an innocent man may well depend upon it—and may God have mercy on your soul if you are being anything less than truthful.”

Jem Cummings straightened slowly, his shovel falling idle in his hands, his toothless gums working back and forth on his lower lip. He hesitated, then setting aside the shovel, turned abruptly away to rummage amongst the assorted effects he had piled up at the edge of the grave. When he swung back, it was with something clutched close in his hand. He hesitated again, then held it up. Stepping gingerly, Lovejoy reached down and found himself holding a heavy iron key.

“I found it in the Lady Chapel,” said Jem, not meeting Lovejoy’s gaze. “Last week, when the cleanin’ lady and me was dealing with the blood and all. It was back under one of them fancy little pews, which is why I reckon your lads didn’t see it. It fits the north transept door.”

Lovejoy sucked in a quick breath that hissed loudly between his teeth. “Why did you not come forward with this immediately?”